Native Ad Exchanges Sprouting; Marketo “Leans In” To B2C

Native advertising appears to be a success, but making it scale is a problem some companies are now trying to solve. Native advertising exchanges are popping up and the last one, as AdWeek’s Mike Shields reported, is Bidtellect. The company is run by John Ferber, who founded Advertising.com, and Lon Otremba, who is CEO. Read more.

Augmenting The Exchange

Former AdECN ad exchange (acquired by Microsoft in 2007) CEO Bill Urschel announced on Tuesday that his new company, A6 Corporation, had acquired “ReachLogic Media, a programmatic trading desk based in New York City.” Read the release. And read GeekWire. The ReachLogic team includes former AppNexus team members who have already been listed in sales and biz dev capacities on A6’s “About Us.” Part of A6’s pitch, according its website: “Running your own campaigns on AppNexus? Use our data for better performance.” See it.

More On Fraud

At the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting, Ad Age caught up with Michael Tiffany, who fought against cybercrime in the financial industry, and who is now an anti-fraud advocate for advertising. He started a company called White Ops to help detect and eliminate bot-infected ad campaigns. In a video interview, Tiffany acknowledges that problem can affect any type of company, including premium publishers. Watch here.

Alibaba USA

Alibaba is coming to the US in the form of retail site 11 Main, according to Reuters, via its subsidiaries Vendio and Auctiva. The site will feature a selection of hand-picked vendors selling everything from technology, jewelry and fashion goods. Read the rest. This is big news, and possibly bad news, for ecommerce giants Amazon and eBay, who haven’t successfully broken into the Chinese market.

B2C Marketing Automation

Independent, publicly traded marketing-automation firm Marketo reported Q4 2012 earnings and revenue on Tuesday – $28.2 million with a slightly deeper loss than Wall Street expected. On the earnings call with Wall Street analysts, CEO Phil Fernandez responded to questions about Marketo’s traditional B2B business shifting into B2C: “We’re reaching a scale and awareness in the market where B2C customers are coming to us and we expect to lean into that. And we’re not in any way backing away from the B2B business, but we’ll continue to expect to see increasing growth and traction in B2C.” Read the transcript on Seeking Alpha (subscription). And read the earnings release.

On Facebook Mobile Ad Ax

Following yesterday’s AdExchanger story on Facebook pruning mobile ad partners, Gamezebo’s Joel Brodie adds more about the two partners who were dropped: “What is not widely known outside the mobile game industry is that everyone uses HasOffers (and to a lesser degree, Kontagent) to track installs. The way it works is that when game developers integrate HasOffers’ SDK into their game, they can create multiple URLs to track an install and download, measuring their tracking campaigns to an exact science. I am not saying HasOffers has a monopoly on app tracking, but everyone I know uses them.” Read more.

Mozilla Eyeballs

A day after Mozilla signaled plans for paid placements called “directory tiles,” CNET reports on plans to build out content through editorial hires and eventual ad sales. "We would like to broaden our audience as much as we can," said Denelle Dixon-Thayer, Mozilla's general counsel and head of its business affairs group. "Anybody who cares about Firefox as much as we do, we can broaden that voice and make it community-driven." Smells like revenue diversification. More.